Using USB devices with GEAR 5.0 for UNIX on Solaris Sparc

From GEAR Software Knowledgebase

New Sun systems are featuring USB ports, or can be expanded with a USB PCI card, on which USB based CD & DVD recorders can be attached. When using such a device with GEAR 5.0, some devices will fail to work properly or may not be seen by GEAR.

Cause

The original USB framework does not support USB 2.0 devices.
The USB 1.0 framework in Solaris 8 & 9 have an issue which causes some commands to fail or be ignored when sent to the drive.
Some USB PCI cards are not compatible with Solaris.

Solution

Solaris 10 users with build 69 or higher should have proper support for USB CD and DVD recording devices. We recommend using the latest build of Solaris 10.

Solaris 9 users must ensure that patch 115553-14 or higher is installed for SPARC or patch 115554-17 for x86.

Solaris 8 users must ensure that patch 109896-29 or higher is installed for SPARC. At this time there is no USB 2.0 support for Solaris 8 on x86.

NOTE 1: GEAR recommends installing these patches with no USB devices attached to the system.

NOTE 2: GEAR recommends to always install the latest patch cluster for your system as opposed to installing individual patches.

After installing the patches, Solaris 8 & 9 users must run the USB Configuration utility and enable USB Framework 1.0 support for USB 2.0 ports by selecting the 'D' option. Do not select the '1' option at this time. The utility can be downloaded at:

Verify if all of the 1.0 framework drivers have been installed by running the following command: 'grep usba /etc/name_to_major' and verify that you see 'usba10_hid' and 'usba10_scsa2usb'. If these drivers are NOT in the list then they must be manually added using the following command: 'add_drv 'n usba10_xxx' where xxx is the missing driver name (e.g. hid, scsa2usb). After this reboot your system.

NOTE 3: Using the add_drv command on these drivers can result in a segmentation fault. If this occurs then reboot your system and try again. In most cases this will work.